Re: bash should not be essential
Santiago Vila Doncel <sanvila@unex.es> writes:
> So if we have to admit bashisms in debian/rules, we are in fact saying
> "Debian packages will always be for Debian/Linux distributions".
No, we are saying that you need bash on any Debian system. Which
systems will bash not build on?
And another thing. I can understand people being annoyed at scripts
that use bashisms when they list #!/bin/sh as their shell. That is
annoying. The solution to this, as far as I'm concerned, is to work
on making bash stricter when it's invoked as /bin/sh. The rest will
take care of itself. Bash is supposed to to that already. If it
doesn't, we should file a bug, or better yet, fix it. That would be a
valuable contribution.
However I think it's pretty unrealistic to expect that you will be
able to convert all the scripts (not just debian/* scripts) in all the
Debian packages to use #!/bin/sh. And in fact, if a Debian
maintainer, or an upstream author, wants to use #!/bin/bash, I feel
that's their prerogative, and to support that, I do think that bash
should remain essential. After all, its installed size is less than
one floppy (683K last time I checked), which is certainly not (IMO)
even worth wasting the time we've already spent arguing this.
--
Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu>
PGP fingerprint = E8 0E 0D 04 F5 21 A0 94 53 2B 97 F5 D6 4E 39 30
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